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It's never too early to start thinking about the next presidential race — especially if you're a political party that has managed to lose the popular vote in five of the last six elections, as the Republican Party has. Hence the remarkable report released Monday by the Republican National Committee, which warned that the GOP looks to many voters like a party of "stuffy old men" who are "driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac." "The Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself," the report said. "We have lost the ability to be persuasive with — or welcoming to — those who do not agree with us on every...

Related "Bertolt Brecht" Articles

It's never too early to start thinking about the next presidential race — especially if you're a political party that has managed to lose the popular vote in five of the last six elections, as the Republican Party has.
Hence the remarkable report...

Vaclav Havel, the former Czech president who died Saturday at 75, was the perfect example of an increasingly rare specimen -- the politically engaged playwright. In today's theatrical climate dominated by silly movie retreads and safe little dramas, Havel's pl

You learn a lot about Fiona Apple by what she chooses to reveal in the lyrics to her new album, “The idler wheel is wiser than the driver of the screw and whipping cords will serve you more than ropes ...

Brecht at Night
Mati Unt
Translated from the Estonian
by Eric Dickens
Dalkey Archive: 208 pp., $13.95 paper
In 1940, Helsinki received an unexpected visitor: Bertolt Brecht. Eventually to be known as the most famous German playwright after Goethe,...

It's no fun being rich when everyone else is poor. Who, for example, would be willing to show up to a dinner party in a brand-new lime-green Lamborghini, in the almost certain knowledge that some of the other guests would be among the growing ranks of the...

Barry Day (ed): "The Letters of Noel Coward" (Vintage)
"The human race is a let down. It thinks it's progressed but it hasn't. It thinks it's risen above the primeval slime but it hasn't -- it's still wallowing in it!," says...

At one time, Los Angeles was Weimar on the Pacific: Numerous German-speaking émigrés put their stamp on the city to which they'd fled.
What with directors such as Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch, writers such as Thomas Mann and Bertolt...

Carlos Monsiváis wasn't a "pundit," although he spoke and wrote with biting irony and insight about politics. He wasn't a "talking head" either, although he regularly appeared on TV shows in his native Mexico to offer erudite...

A few weeks ago, on a fog-enshrouded night in Malibu, Richard Montoya stepped onstage in full mariachi regalia to welcome his audience to what he slyly called the "Getty Pancho Villa."
The occasion was a performance of "Peace,"...

Before Hans Zimmer even began work on Guy Ritchieâs take on âSherlock Holmes,â the film was loaded with Zimmer music. As he was about to embark on the seven-month project that would be composing and conducting the score for the ...

Will the truth triumph over superstition and dogma? That was the question hovering in a Tehran theater Sunday afternoon as 14 men and women in black clothes circled around the astronomer Galileo Galilei in director Dariush Farhang's sometimes nightmarish, poli

From San Francisco The happiest surprise of British director John Doyleâs dashing, apocalyptic staging of Bertolt Brechtâs âThe Caucasian Chalk Circle,â which opened Wednesday at San Franciscoâs American Conservatory Theater, is the depth of feeling

--Bidding farewell: John L. Gray, president of the Autry National Center of the American West, will announce his retirement today. (Los Angeles Times) --Scientific treasure: The original 46-page manuscript of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity will

Hanns Eisler is not, yet, a recovered voice. A two-time Oscar nominee for best score, the German composer, who fled the Nazis in 1933, was the first in motion pictures to be called up by the House Committee on Un-American ...

Like many opera illiterates, I used to associate Richard Wagnerâs âGotterdammerungâ with one thing: Nazis. Those ominous strings, the rumbling timpani, the heroic heralding horns; they could mean only one thing ... more Hitler footage on t

The pulse of the tango insinuates itself into a Chinese opera. A British comedy erupts in the midst of a bunraku performance. Guatemalan cloth brushes up against Oriental silk.These are but a few of the cultural mash-ups on view in ...